President Obama, Guest Blogger

On Wednesday morning, President Obama released a short, seven-paragraph explanation of what he is looking for in a Supreme Court nominee.

The message was nothing new. It contained the usual, unobjectionable boilerplate about a nominee who is “eminently qualified,” has an “independent mind” and “a record of excellence and integrity,” “understands that a judge’s job is to interpret the law, not make the law,” and so on.

What was unusual was the medium: Mr. Obama’s words ran as a guest post on SCOTUSblog, the 14-year-old Supreme Court news and analysis site that is a must-read for all court watchers. (Perhaps this will advance SCOTUSblog’s already-strong argument for Supreme Court press credentials.)

From the start of his national political career, Mr. Obama has been quick to embrace the possibilities of the internet and social media. And while Wednesday morning’s entry may not count as the very first presidential blog post in history — that distinction probably goes to a 2013 post Mr. Obama wrote in support of the Employment Anti-Discrimination Act for the Huffington Post — it was notable nevertheless.

Unfortunately, it left any reader who has not been stuck under a rock for the past month wanting more. Not only was it, as Mr. Obama warned, predictably “spoiler-free,” it was almost laughably anodyne. “A sterling record”? “A commitment to impartial justice”? No one, other than perhaps Donald Trump, would disagree.

The only plausible fighting words were Mr. Obama’s promise to pick a nominee with “the kind of life experience earned outside the classroom and the courtroom; experience that suggests he or she views the law not only as an intellectual exercise, but also grasps the way it affects the daily reality of people’s lives in a big, complicated democracy, and in rapidly changing times.”

That will surely set off alarm bells for conservatives and originalists who believe that the Constitution should only be interpreted to mean what it meant at the time it was drafted. But of course, they already know Mr. Obama — like many other constitutional scholars — sees it differently. In fact, from the beginning of his tenure he’s emphasized his preference for justices who have “a practical sense of how the world works.”

At least the originalists can take heart that he didn’t say “empathy.”